1. Field of the Invention
The disclosed technology generally relates to devices having energy scavenging modules that employ efficient power management operations.
2. Description of the Related Technology
Low-power consumption and small volume are key demands for wireless autonomous transducer solutions (WATS) architectures. This demand is a motivation to work on various advanced miniaturized energy systems (ES) that can efficiently deliver power to demanding applications. To enable autonomy these systems need to be efficiently combined with low-power consumption electronics.
It is critical to maximize the autonomy, while satisfying user performance requirements. Commercially available wireless sensor platforms often rely on general purpose processors and standard radios, such as ZigBee or Bluetooth radios, which lead to high power consumption. Typically such applications have power consumption values in the order of tens of mW in active modes. As a result, their application is constrained to battery-operated systems, thus having a limited autonomy. Research efforts for WATS have been focused on power optimization at block level in the past: ultra-low power radios, energy harvesters, batteries and power management circuits. In order to improve the integration efficiency and achieve increased autonomy WATS architectural modeling becomes necessary. Previous work on energy management architectures has been reported in X. Jiang, J. Taneja, J. Ortiz, A. Tavakoli, P. Dutta, J. Jeong, D. Culler, P. Levis, and S. Shenker, “An Architecture for Energy Management in Wireless Sensor Networks,” International Workshop on Wireless Sensor Network Architecture, Cambridge, Mass., USA, April 2007. The basic idea behind this architecture is to reduce the overall power consumption, switching to low-power modes at block level when possible, while satisfying application constraints.